SSE Normal Maps in SSE Effect Shader

[crystalnynja]

Apologies if this is an old topic - I've searched for similar threads, but not found exactly what I'm looking for. I may have searched for the wrong thing, I'm fairly new to writing Skyrim mods.

 

 

So I'm currently modifying a select number of effect shaders, for SSE. I can apply a fill texture easily enough, but can I also apply a normal map? How, if so?

 

I see many instances of texture.dds, paired with texture_n.dds in other people's work - is Skyrim/SSE generally smart enough to know that if it loads "texture.dds", the same file name with _n suffix is the normal, or is that just a common naming convention?

 

 

If I can't load a normal separately, can I bake it into the fill texture itself somehow? Would Skyrim even render it?

[Mebantiza]

No, the engine has no means of automatically applying a normal map, or any other texture type, in the manner you suggest. The path and location of the normal map has to be defined in the objects mesh. You will also see normal maps paths set in TEXTURE SETS as well.